Tom Wishon Golf Technology is the leader in professional custom clubfitting design, research and technology.
Our original, high performance designs are available only custom fit to each individual golfer, through professional custom clubmakers world wide. Please visit our CLUBFITTER LOCATOR to find a certified, experienced custom clubmaker in your area.
Custom fitting is for ALL golfers – in truth, the higher your handicap, the more custom fitting can improve your play and lower your score. Don’t be fooled by the marketing of the big golf companies into believing that the best clubs are bought standard off the rack through pro shops and retail golf stores.
Please take a moment to read why custom clubfitting is the only way any golfer should ever consider buying their next set of golf clubs. We welcome you to discover why Wishon Golf is the leader in professional custom clubfitting design.
Tom Wishon Golf Technology – Only Custom for You and Your Swing, Never Standard
With more than 35 years of experience in the field, Tom Wishon Golf Technology is recognized as one of the industry leaders in the research of golf club design, performance and clubfitting technology. Our R&D has been at the forefront of the golf industry including the development of more than 50 golf club design technology firsts as well as countless discoveries in the science of golf club performance for golfers.
Having begun his golf equipment career in 1972, Tom Wishon has designed over 300 original and innovative clubhead models, more than any other single person in the 500 year history of the game. His clubhead designs represent more than 50 different technology firsts. (CLICK HERE)
Tom Wishon is the only designer from the custom clubmaking side of the golf industry whose clubhead designs have been used to win on the PGA Tour, the Champions Senior Tour and in Ryder Cup competition. He has designed and custom built the golf clubs used in competition by Scott Verplank, Bruce Lietzke, Ben Crenshaw, as well as the last set of clubs played by Payne Stewart before his tragic accident in 1999.
Tom is the also the author of 9 books within the field of golf club design, performance and clubfitting, in addition to hundreds of equipment related articles written for virtually every golf publication in the golf industry. As Terry McSweeney, Director of Communications for the PGA of America states, “Tom has the unique ability to communicate technical issues about golf equipment so non-technically minded people can easily understand and follow the subject”.
Two of Wishon’s books, The Search for the Perfect Golf Club and The Search for the Perfect Driver qualified for best-selling status and won successive Book of the Year awards in 2006 and 2007 from the International Network of Golf, the oldest and largest organization of golf industry media professionals in the world. Shortly after they were published, both books became a part of the curriculum for membership training in the PGA’s of Sweden, Great Britain, Belgium and the Netherlands.
He is considered the ‘go-to guy’ by the equipment editors for many of the major consumer golf publications in their search for honest, marketing-free explanations about the technical performance of golf clubs. Jim Achenbach, equipment editory for Golfweek magazine has said, “Tom is the smartest person in the golf industry when it comes to golf clubs.”
As Tom stated in making his decision to establish his own company in 2003, “I completely respect the product design work of the large golf equipment companies. But my three decades in golf club R&D has proven without question that the best set of golf clubs any golfer will ever play will be a set of professionally custom fit golf clubs, and not a set of standard made clubs simply bought off the shelf. I am committed to educating golfers about the tangible, game improvement benefits of being professionally custom fit because I know this is the only way any golfer can hope to play to the best of their ability and benefit the most from swing instruction.”
Professional custom clubfitting involves matching each one of the 13 key clubfitting elements for every club in the bag to each golfer’s combination of size, strength, athletic ability and swing characteristics.
A colleague of ours in the custom clubmaking industry once made an analogy between custom clubfitting and washing your car that we believe to be very appropriate.
If your car is dirty and trashed out, you can pull it into the driveway, hook up the hose and spray off most of the surface dirt and grime. On the other hand, you can do a better job washing your car by filling a bucket with soapy water and scrub off all of the dirt with a sponge. Or, you can pull out all of the stops and not only scrub the outside of the car, but wash, wipe, vacuum and detail the inside as well and finish with a wax and buff job. Yet all of these can be considered to be “washing your car.”
Custom clubfitting is very much the same way. There are different options available in the golf business, all which are termed by some to be a “custom fitting.” The problem is, since 98% of all golfers really don’t know what constitutes a professional custom fitting, it’s easy to think you’re getting the ‘full detail job’ when you’re really ending up with only a ‘hose job.’
Professional Custom Fitting is not answering five or six questions on a web site to be ‘fit’.
Professional Custom Fitting is not a cart filled with different golf clubs sitting in a pro shop or on the practice range.
Professional Custom Fitting is not attending a Demo Day at your local driving range and hitting clubs until you find something you like.
Professional Custom Fitting is not something that can be accomplished from start to finish in 20 minutes or less, regardless if you are hitting balls on a launch monitor.
Professional Custom Fitting is not done by altering a limited number of specifications of an existing standard made set of golf clubs.
Professional Custom Fitting is not buying a driver with an adjustable hosel that can only alter two of the thirteen key clubfitting specifications and only within a very limited range of options.
Professional Custom Fitting IS working one on one with a trained custom clubmaker to analyze all of your individual swing characteristics to accurately determine each one of the 13 key clubfitting specifications on ALL 14 golf clubs in the bag. Professional Custom Fitting IS having all 14 of your golf clubs custom fit and custom built from scratch, in the same manner as a tailor making a custom suit, with every one of the key fitting specifications fit to your size, strength, athletic ability and swing characteristics . Professional Custom Fitting IS the domain of the serious, professional clubmaker who ‘lives, eats and breathes’ all of the technical information available which will allow him or her to accurately match each golfer’s swing to the best fit set of golf clubs. It is NOT the domain of the sales person or club professional in a retail golf store or pro shop.
Golf clubs have been sold off the rack in pro shops and retail golf stores pre-built to a series of standard specifications because this is the only way the big golf companies can sell the volume of clubs they need to sell to achieve the highest level of sales. Golf is admittedly a difficult game to master, but it is made more difficult when a population of golfers who are anything but standard make the mistake of buying golf clubs which are mass produced to one series of standard specifications.
Don’t make the mistake of buying golf clubs on the basis of the brand name, model name or what pros play that brand. Don’t believe the myth that custom fit golf clubs only help low handicap golfers. Professionally custom fit golf clubs are proven to enable golfers of all abilities, and especially those with a handicap between 12 and 25, to be able to play to the best of their ability.
To find an experienced, certified professional custom clubfitter with whom you can work to be custom fit, please take a moment to visit the FIND A CLUBFITTER link on our site.
The next time you go to the golf course or the driving range, take a moment to observe how different golfers are in their size, strength, athletic ability and most of all, in their swing characteristics. Then stop and think how golf clubs have always been sold to all these different golfers. All of the different brands and models of golf clubs all sitting in displays, already built to a pre-ordained series of standard specifications determined by each golf club company. It is no different than a shoe store stocked with all the different brands and styles, but with all the men’s shoes stocked in a size 10 and all the women’s in a size 7.
Yes, you do get a choice of a couple of different shaft flexes within the one shaft model installed in each club model. And you can choose between a few different lofts in just the driver. Did you know that there have never been standards in the golf industry for how stiff any of the letter flexes of shafts are? Did you know that many golf companies make their driver heads so the loft is actually different than the loft number put on the head? Did you know that there are no less than 13 different fitting elements in golf clubs that need to be custom fit to each golfer to enable them to play to the best of their given ability?
Now think about this. Like baseball and softball, golf is a sport in which we use a “stick” to hit a ball. But golf is the only “stick hits ball” sport in which the “sticks” are sold in a standard, mass produced, one size fits all manner. When you go to a sporting goods store to buy a bat, just like golf clubs you see all the different brands and models of bats sitting on racks, ready to buy. But the difference is that all the bats are commonly stocked in different lengths, different weights, different handle diameters – the three key “fitting specifications” for a bat.
If a sports store sold bats the same way golf shops sell golf clubs, no baseball or softball player would ever buy a bat there. Why? Because baseball and softball players all know to be able to hit the ball to the best of their ability, they need to use a bat that has the right length, right weight, right handle diameter to match the player’s size, strength, athletic ability and swing.
Same for tennis, another “stick hits ball” sport. Premium quality tennis rackets are offered in a series of different grip sizes and are never pre-strung. Tennis players pick the grip size they need to fit their hand, and then pick the string type and string tension based on their swing speed and manner of play. What’s more, in tennis, string tension, which is the equivalent to shaft flex in a golf club is standardized through out the entire tennis industry. When you ask for your racket to be strung to 55 lbs of tension, that’s what you get. In golf, because there are no standards for flex, the R-flex from one company can be the same stiffness as the S-flex or A-flex from another company!
Golf clubs are sold off the rack, built to one series of standard specifications because it would be far too difficult for the golf companies to make all the different combinations of custom fitting specifications that golfers need, and too difficult for the golf retail stores to stock all the different brands and models in all the different custom fitting options that all the golfers would need to fit their swings. So golf clubs have remained a “one size fits all” business and golfers have been led to never question it.
That’s too bad because within this more convenient business model of the golf equipment industry, golfers are getting the short end of this business stick. When custom fitting is performed by a knowledgeable, experienced custom clubmaker, each club is customized and built for all 13 of the key fitting specifications to the individual needs of each golfer. When accurately and fully custom fit, golfers can see visible shot improvement and can then play to the best of their ability.
Because the big golf club companies have always built and sold their clubs to a “national average” of golfer size, strength and swing ability, whenever golfers buy new clubs and experience no visible shot improvement, they blame themselves for the problem. After all, the game is difficult to master and it can’t possibly be the fault of the clubs, right?
Wrong. Yes, the game is difficult to master. But anyone who was reasonably good in sports when they were in school should be able to hit golf shots with more than a 50% success rate. The problem is that a population of golfers that are very different from each other in their size, strength, athletic ability and swing characteristics simply cannot play their best using golf clubs which are built to one series of standard specifications.
During a television interview aired on The Golf Channel, Tiger Woods was asked what he noticed the most about the amateurs he plays with in pro-am events. His response was that he sees very few golfers who are ever custom fit with clubs that could accent the positive things they do in their swings and reduce some of the effects of the chronic mistakes they make. In a 2011 interview with GOLF magazine, Nick Faldo made the comment that 98% of all the golfers he encounters do not play with golf clubs that are fit to match their swings.
Are YOU still playing with standard made clubs bought off the rack? If you are, you are definitely reducing your chance to be able to play to the best of your ability. As the leader in custom clubfitting design and technical research, Tom Wishon Golf Technology welcomes you to learn more about professional custom fitting, to find a custom clubfitter in your area, and to experience how professional custom clubfitting can help you play to the very best of your individual ability.